Topics

After nine years of Stephen Mandel and his (very expensive) plans for our city, the last person I want as mayor in next month’s municipal election is another big-dreaming, big-spending visionary.

When Mandel became mayor in 2004, he was seen as a pro-development tightwad with the public purse. Yet back then the city had $40 million worth of debt. Granted, we had an infrastructure deficit. A big reason we had so little debt was that we had put off making needed upgrades to roadways and bridges, sewers and street lights.

But now after Mandel’s tenure, Edmonton has a $2 billion debt and -- wait for it -- an infrastructure deficit. We’ve racked up a significant debt and our streets still feel like washboard country roads.

It’s telling that one of the first observations made by 2011 Tour de France winner Cadel Evans when he was in town this week for the Tour of Alberta race is that we have “lots of potholes on the road.” Where were the Edmonton-needs-to-become-world-class boosters, such as Mandel, when Evans made that comment?

Time and again over the past decade, these legions of enlightened ones have told us mere citizens that we must build expensive new LRT lines and grand hockey palaces and new bridges with fancy ornamental architecture and vaulting, glowing archways at the entrance to our city lest visitors consider us second-rate. At the same time, these great-vision thinkers have dismissed talk about the nuts-and-bolts of city management -- like keeping the roads paved in summer and free of snow in winter -- as small-minded, outdated and parochial.

But as cyclist Evans demonstrates, visitors and those who would potentially move their businesses or families here are every bit as impressed by the little, seemingly unimportant things as they are by the grandiose schemes and dreams of city officials and politicians.

So in the mayor’s race, I am looking first and foremost for a candidate who understands how to make a city function rather than those one thinks it’s enough to nail up a few fancy facades and trumpet Edmonton as a major city.

Having said that, I still want a candidate with some sense of where the city should be going and how to get us there. He or she just also has to be someone who doesn’t permit high-minded brain cramps to push aside concentration on the day-to-day details like cutting the grass in parks and on sports fields (as seemingly dull as those details may be).

So I will be looking for a potential mayor with some balance.

Over the next decade or two, as much as $1 trillion will flow through Edmonton in development and economic activity. How does each candidate plan to position city government to make the most of that -- not by leeching off that activity to expand the bureaucracy and civic workforce, but by gently guiding private and individual initiative to better our city as a whole?

What I’m talking about doesn’t have to be done on the public dime. For instance, visitors would probably be far more impressed by a necklace of riverside cafes and bistros strung along the North Saskatchewan than by an expensive new, illuminated bridge. And for the most part all the city would have to do is change some building regulations. The investment could all be private.

And I want a new mayor who understands that while buses and LRTs and bikes are nice, the vast majority of Edmontonians commute by car and always will. Motorists are not second-class citizens.

So far, what I have seen of the major candidates doesn’t give me much hope. But it’s early yet.

Gunter: Edmonton does not need another 'big spending visionary'

After nine years of Stephen Mandel and his (very expensive) plans for our city, the last person I want as mayor in next month’s municipal election is another big-dreaming, big-spending visionary.

When Mandel became mayor in 2004, he was seen as a pro-development tightwad with the public purse. Yet back then the city had $40 million worth of debt. Granted, we had an infrastructure deficit. A big reason we had so little debt was that we had put off making needed upgrades to roadways and bridges, sewers and street lights.

But now after Mandel’s tenure, Edmonton has a $2 billion debt and -- wait for it -- an infrastructure deficit. We’ve racked up a significant debt and our streets still feel like washboard country roads.